The Wreckers
by George Makana Clark
“One should never come straight at a thing,” argues Nuno Bárbaro de Castro, our guide to THE WRECKERS (Europa, 281 pp., $28), Clark’s devilishly picaresque excursion into the history and legacy of Portugal’s African slave trade. And, true to form, Nuno’s efforts to unlock the secrets of the last will and testament of his distant ancestor, an enslaved Mozambican named Garoto Bárbaro, ricochet from civil war clashes in the diamond fields of Angola to a prison break in Louisiana to grave-robbing in Lisbon. Lurking behind all these adventures lies a lost African empire called Mbálá, which may exist “not in this world, but in the world of the dead.”
Armed with an endless supply of forged $20 bills, Nuno embarks on a decades-long search for the strange artifacts (brass denture plates, cranioscopy instruments, Jean Lafitte’s compass) listed in Bárbaro’s will. In the process, he encounters descendants of the people mentioned in that 19th-century document — and ensnares them in his quest. Thus he honors the mission of the original Wreckers, “the broken clans” left behind when their friends and families were stolen by enslavers. Hoping to save others, they lit bonfires that lured ships bound for the Middle Passage onto the African shore.
In his search for the ruins of Mbálá, Nuno’s own ship makes it all the way up an Angolan river only to become mired in a swamp. But he’s come too far, maneuvered too long, to give up in defeat. Within reach, he knows, is evidence of a tragedy that “resonates across generations and continents.”
The Chinese Lady
by Bo Wang
In 1834, two American entrepreneurs brought a young Chinese woman to New York in a scheme to promote the goods they’d imported from Canton. As Wang explains in THE CHINESE LADY (HarperVia, 368 pp., $30), the woman’s name is “lost to history.” To compensate, each section of this vividly realized novel gives her a different name — and a different narrative perspective.
Our introduction to Little Sparrow comes via the story of her mother, Pearl, a wealthy merchant’s concubine who binds the feet of her 6-year-old daughter. Within the household, the child is viewed as a commodity, sold to foreign “ghosts” when the family fortunes take a tumble.
We next see her through the eyes of Margaret, an unhappily married ship captain’s wife, chaperone to the girl she calls Julia. But when Julia’s appeal as a curiosity wanes — and she attracts the amorous attention of Margaret’s husband — she’s abruptly dispatched to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum.
Here we’re guided through her trials by Joice, a fellow performer billed as “the oldest Negro in the world,” who nicknames her new roommate China. It isn’t until the unfortunate woman escapes Barnum’s sideshow and turns up as the madam of a San Francisco bordello that she takes center stage, calling herself Mrs. Moy. By then, though, Chinese immigrants are no longer depicted as exotic heirs of an ancient, fascinating civilization; they’re despised as dangerous heathen riffraff. And so, just when she’s finally taken control of her life, Mrs. Moy may need to adopt yet another alias.
The Barman of the Ritz
by Philippe Collin
THE BARMAN OF THE RITZ (Scribner, 416 pp., $29) is a different sort of World War II novel, less about heroism or villainy than the myriad compromises and pitfalls of daily life under German occupation. Deftly translated from the French by Frank Wynne, it’s Collin’s attempt “to capture the conflicting emotions that may have preoccupied Frank Meier,” the famed real-life author of “The Artistry of Mixing Drinks,” who spent the war plying his trade at Paris’s premier luxury hotel, serving Pink Ladies to Hermann Göring and acting as a middleman in a clandestine art-for-fake-passport exchange.
Austrian by birth and a nonpracticing Jew by heritage, Collin’s Meier allows himself, as one colleague puts it, “to drift with evil currents.” In the “glamour bunker” that is the Ritz, he’s sheltered from the privations suffered by the populace at large, but inside its walls there’s still considerable danger — not just from Nazi “guests,” but from staff members whose loyalties are in question. As the war grinds on, Meier comes to an unsettling conclusion: “This bar was his church; now it is his prison.”
The Depopulation
by Marina Closs
The title of THE DEPOPULATION (Bellevue Literary Press, 316 pp., paperback, $17.99) refers to the mass evacuation of Jesuit missions under threat from European marauders in the 17th-century South American jungles. But the strength of Closs’s novel, inventively translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, lies not in its plot but in its provocative, often gently humorous contrasting of Indigenous Guaraní beliefs with those of Mission San Ignacio’s two leaders.
This comes to a head when the deeply eccentric, confoundingly mystical Father Ruiz must deal with a local man’s insistence that he is the son of God, Jesus’s younger brother. After much consideration, Ruiz and his slightly more worldly comrade, Father Maceta, decide that the way to solve this difficult situation is to find the man a wife. With, alas, predictably unpredictable results.
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